Best overall: Travelwey Home LED Alarm Clock, $20

Travelwey's alarm clock excels at simplicity. It's $20, which is a little more than other competent models I tested, but still easily affordable for something you'll use every day. It only has a handful of buttons, all of which are easy to understand and use. The big red numbers dominate the front and the snooze button is easy to find and smack when you want to shut up the alarm in the morning.

You can adjust the brightness of the numbers with a slider on the back. At all levels of brightness, the numbers are large enough to be easily visible from across a dark room and they don't cast a glow that could disrupt your sleep. The Travelwey Home LED Alarm Clock also has a separate nightlight feature if you don't want your room to be pitch black.

Other than the nightlight, Travelwey's alarm doesn't have much in terms of features. You can't adjust the snooze time -- it's 9 minutes. You can't set a second alarm. You can switch between two volume settings for the alarm, but you can't change the tone or have it play music or the radio.

It's a simple alarm clock, but Travelwey made sure all of the basics were well implemented. A simple indicator shows the alarm is armed. It has a backup battery. You can check the time with a button and press a separate one to turn off the alarm but leave it set for the same time the next day. There's not much to the Travelwey Home LED Alarm Clock, but what's there works well.

Best features for the price: Sony ICFC-1, $18

The Sony ICFC-1 costs $20, the same as the Travelwey Home LED. It has a radio built in so you can wake up to your favorite station or a more traditional buzzing. You can set a sleep timer so you can fall asleep to the radio as it plays. It adjusts the time automatically for daylight saving time. Even the buzzing alarm gently ramps up to ease you out of your slumber, and the snooze button is easy to find if you need more time.

You'll want to keep the manual handy when first setting up the Sony ICFC-1. Even setting and checking your alarm time is counterintuitive at first. There's no button for it -- you hit the plus or minus on top to see the time then keep hitting one or the other to set the alarm time. Once you know what to press, using the ICFC-1 is simple enough, it's just not quite as brainless as the Travelwey alarm.

The cube design is also a little hard to get used to, and the orange numbers aren't as easily visible from across the room as those on the Travelwey alarm. That said, you can cycle through three levels of brightness by tapping the snooze button, none of which create an unwanted glow. The ICFC-1 also has a button to turn off the alarm that keeps it set for the same time. It has a backup battery and a clear indicator when the alarm is armed.

I liked Travelwey's alarm slightly more as it's easier to set up, and its clock is easier to see from across a darkened room, but Sony's alarm makes a strong case for itself by doing more for the same price and it could easily be the better choice for you if you value those extras.

Best gradual wake alarm: Philips HF3500, $43

If you're willing to spend more than $20 for an alarm, you can look for all kinds of different features. Of all of the potential alarm upgrades, the sunrise alarm on the $50 Philips HF3500 is the only one that actually makes it easier to wake up in the morning. Shaped a bit like a UFO with a kickstand, the HF3500 has a simple circular orange clock face surrounded by a couple of buttons and a wide light ring. Thirty minutes before the scheduled alarm time, the light gradually starts increasing in brightness until it reaches a customizable max at the scheduled time and starts beeping with increasing intensity to finish the task of waking you up.

The light is supposed to gently ease you awake by simulating the sunrise. On both mornings of my testing, I had a relatively easy time getting out of bed. Aside from the light, the Philips HF3500 is easy to operate with minimal buttons. You can use the light as a lamp and it has 10 levels of brightness. You can cycle through three levels of brightness for the clock face, but the orange numbers do a good job of not casting much of a glow even at their brightest.

Snoozing the alarm is counterintuitive, as you need to whack the upper half of the light -- there's no button. I'd worry that I'd accidentally break my fancy alarm on a particularly grouchy morning. For around $50, the HF3500 surprisingly lacks any extras other than the wake-up light, and I doubt that will be much help for deep sleepers, or those with rooms that already get bright when day breaks.

Nevertheless, the HF3500 keeps things simple and elegant while still innovating on the basic concept of waking up in the morning. Splurging on the HF3500 could be a worthwhile experiment if you're looking for a more peaceful way of waking up.

Best ultrabudget alarm: RCA RCD30, $11

The RCD30 has a lot in common with my favorite of the bunch, the Travelwey. The RCD30 is simple, with only a couple of buttons. It has a large red display with two levels of brightness -- neither glow and you can easily see both from across a dark room. The snooze button is easy to find, but double-checking your alarm time and resetting it for the next day aren't as easy on the RCD30 as on the Travelwey. Also unlike the Travelwey, the RCD30 doesn't have a nightlight. Given that it's only about $11, it's a good alternative if you want something cheap and simple.

Best for deep sleepers: Sonic Alert Sonic Bomb, $37

I hated the Sonic Bomb -- but that's a good thing if you're a semicomatose sleeper. To be clear, I didn't hate the $32 Sonic Bomb because of poor design or poor performance, I hated it because I woke up to my pillow shaking and I thought the world was ending. The alarm has an incredibly loud buzzer and a vibrating attachment you can place on your bed in case the buzzer itself isn't enough. The Sonic Bomb offers two alarms and plenty of customization. The controls are easy enough to figure out. It's worth your consideration if you have trouble waking up and it deserves to be mentioned alongside the Philips HF3500 as a good implementation of a novelty concept. But unless you truly are a very deep sleeper, the Philips makes for a much more pleasing morning routine.

American Lifetime Day Clock, $45

I was torn about the American Lifetime Day Clock, because the large print design struck my fancy and could come in handy if you have an elderly relative or impaired vision. The clock even spells out the day and date, and you can program alarms with a reminder message such as "take your medicine" to help relatives with memory trouble. That said, I'm primarily judging alarm clocks here, and it isn't a good alarm clock. You can't snooze, the display casts a glow even at its dimmest, and setting alarms is a pain. You have to scroll through a menu that could easily be confusing for an elderly relative -- so you'd be stuck with all the setup and even maintenance when a setting needs to be changed. The $45 American Lifetime Day Clock might be worth considering if you need a time display capable of reminders, but you can find better options if you just want an alarm with big numbers.

iHome iBT29BC, $43

If you want features, the $43-ish iHome iBT29BC likely has you covered. It has a built-in radio, two alarms, it doubles as a Bluetooth speaker and even comes with an auxiliary cable. It has a backup battery, it can double as a speakerphone and communicate with your phone's digital assistant. It has a light that changes colors and lots of customization for what to play when you wake up. The light won't fade up like the Philips HF3500, but it can turn on when your alarm sounds. Plus, the sound quality is surprisingly good. The snooze button is a little too small and you'll want to keep the instruction manual handy when you first start using it. The clock face shines too brightly when turned up and it's hard to see from across the room when dim. The iHome iBT29BC does a little bit of everything, but it's not great at any one thing, and for the price, if you want a speaker to wake you up, you might as well get a smart speaker.

Homelabs Home Sunrise Alarm Clock, $18

Given that the Home Sunrise Alarm Clock performs ostensibly the same trick as the Philips HF3500 for a fraction of the price -- $18 for the Home Clock as opposed to $50 for the HF3500 -- I was excited to try it out. It even has a few more features -- the light changes colors, you can customize which color turns on in the morning and how long it fades up before your chose alarm time. It has a radio and you can pick from a variety of wake-up sounds, including waves crashing and classical music. On paper, the Sunrise Alarm Clock offers everything you could want in an alarm at a great price. It also proves that you get what you pay for. The touch buttons on the front aren't very responsive -- setting the time, setting an alarm and turning off the alarm in the morning are all more difficult than they need to be. Using the radio is surprisingly tedious. The brightness ramps up too quickly in the morning and the white numbers showing the time cast too much light at night. If you can get around the tedium, the Sunrise Alarm Clock does offer a lot of features for the price.